The Skydive Office of Cultural Affairs is pleased to present An Exhibition of Proposals for a Socialist Colony.

In the mid 1800’s a box of national archives went missing during the Archive War causing Skydive’s land to revert to its original deed. It stipulates that the land be granted to any group starting a socialist colony on the property. The works in this exhibition are proposals for this new colony. They contribute a variety of perspectives on the fruitful paradoxes that reside in the quest for individual freedom and the necessity for social contracts, collective processes and their sometimes authoritarian implementation.

Mounted in Houston, Texas, the exhibition is set against a backdrop of the state’s historical independence from Mexico and the United States, and in which a libertarian spirit persists and is legally protected. There are no zoning laws in Houston: any enterprise can exist within any building or neighborhood. The premise of this exhibition takes advantage of this lenient civic stance (without it the proposed colony could never exist), to designate a zone for debate about where personal necessity ends and public life begins, and what role self-organization can play in the development of collective processes.

An Exhibition of Proposals for a Socialist Colony has been built from proposals for systems, tools, communities, communications, resource use, historical research, democratic gestures, implementation, and a public relations campaign. To produce this project the artists and curators engaged in a collaborative practice, where artists could operate as organizers and decisions were subject to the group.